


But break my heart for I must hold my tongue

by Lleavingwonderland



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky is going to be ok, M/M, Pining, one-sided stucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-24 08:56:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20703320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lleavingwonderland/pseuds/Lleavingwonderland
Summary: Bucky is an entire person with or without Steve Rogers—it just doesn’t feel like that sometimes.





	But break my heart for I must hold my tongue

**Author's Note:**

> title from 'hamlet'

Bucky has a list of things that he never wrote down. Not like Steve, perfect and perfectly optimistic Steve, with his little notebook of songs and movies. Bucky had seen Steve’s list, chuckled flipping through the pages.

_“Come on, Buck.” Steve had groaned. “Gimme a break, it helps.”_  
_ “So how was,” he scanned the list. “Star Wars?”_  
_ “Not bad. It was Nat’s suggestion.”_  
_ “What do you have left?”_  
_ Steve took the book back, long gentle fingers brushing against Bucky’s, and flipped a few pages to the end. “Almost finished. You should make one, figure out what all you want to catch up on.”_  
Bucky had laughed it off, said Steve can tell him the highlights.

He does make a list though. That night when Steve’s asleep (in the next room) (on the ground of Bucky’s Wakandan safe haven) Bucky decides on item one: tell Steve. Tell Steve the words that have been sticking in his throat since they were school kids. Tell Steve what every single one of these visits seemed fraught with, the two men out of time alone in an impossible country. Tell Steve to stay. Tell him why. _Just tell him._

But in the morning Steve is gone. Another mission. Saving the world and all that. And therein lay an irreconcilable difference, maybe their only one: Steve wanted to save the world, to belong to it, Bucky just wanted Steve.

Maybe that makes him selfish. Maybe that makes him undeserving of the very man he loves. Bucky doesn’t care.

In the weeks before he sees Steve again, the list mutates. It turns into a list of things that could happen if he tells Steve. A list of ways he could finally do it. A list of ways that Steve could react. All the ways he would give a closed off smile and try to let Bucky down gently. Or the one way it could go right.

Bucky isn’t much of an optimist, not much of a believer in a brighter future, but Steve always was. And after years of dark that just kept getting darker, Steve was the one who pulled Bucky back into the light. Maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe he wasn’t the only one out of the two of them hoping it could get impossibly brighter still.

But the next time he sees Steve, he sees Captain America. Bucky is back in the fight, back with a metal arm: all for him, only for him. He could have taken a medical discharge in 43 but he stayed in Europe for Steve, the same way that he wades back into the fight today.

“A semi-stable 100 year old man,” he calls himself. _See past the surroundings, see our past, see me, see me._  
Steve embraces him, (_tell him)_ and he knows it’s not the time. But he wishes it was. When the fight is over, he promises himself, when they’ve won, he’ll have no excuses left to hide behind. When the fight is over, he’s going to get started on his list.

He wishes it was the last fight. This old soldier is so tired, but he knows that as long as Steve keeps fighting, Bucky’ll keep following him.

Then Thanos happens.

He dies the only way he ever could, to Steve screaming his name.

But death isn’t the end for him—it never was before.

He wakes up where he fell. But nothing is the same as it was. He’s lost more time—five more years. He follows Sam into a battle and beholds Steve, godlike, from afar. The aftermath is a blur: the battlefield, the monsters, the funeral, until everyone finally disperses.

“Where will you go?” Bucky asks him.

Steve is silent, stares out at the lake off of Stark’s porch.

“If the base is gone you could always…” Come home with me.

“I’m leaving,” he says.

“Leaving.” Bucky repeats, not quite sure what he means.

“Someone has to take the stones back and I volunteered.”

“But you have a way to come back after that. I thought that’s what you and Stark did before.”

“We did, we did. But, Buck, I saw Peggy,” Steve finally turns to face him.

And it’s enough to knock the air out of his lungs, the sadness on Steve’s face isn’t hidden deep in his eyes anymore. It’s plainly there for anyone to see. Bucky wants, more than anything, to take it away. He wishes that he was enough.

_Peggy_.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Steve implores him. How could he ever say no? How could he be anything but loyal to his captain? “I know…I know they would try to stop me.”

“You’re really going back for her?” Bucky is angry but he sounds so pathetic in his own ears.

“It’s been 10 years, Buck. I just don’t belong here. Don’t you feel like that?”

“Maybe it’s different for me,” Bucky says. Maybe I have everything I need.

What happened to the end of the line?

The end of the line is a time machine in the woods. And Sam Wilson doesn’t know why Bucky is acting so weird. And Steve, blind beautiful Steve, is smiling for the future.

“Don’t do anything stupid until I get back.” It comes out like a taunt. Bucky said those words decades ago as he was torn away from Steve the first time—by a war and a draft. And here was Steve, running, acting like it was the same.

_Tell him._  
_ Tell him._  
_ Tell him._  
_ Tell him now. Tell him to stay. Tell him why._

But he can’t. So he just nods, and coward that he is, Bucky Barnes watches Steve Rogers walk away from him for the last time and doesn’t try to stop him.

Bucky is an entire person with or without Steve Rogers—it just doesn’t feel like that sometimes.

It doesn’t feel like it when Steve disappears with the weapons of a god and reappears as an old man. Changed suddenly and irreparably—not in the slow glad laughter lined ways that Bucky had imagined.

He’s glad he never got around to writing his list down.

The gold band around Steve’s finger feels like numb. It feels like Steve finished all his lists, lived all his life, and Bucky wasn’t even important enough to be a part of it.

And he promises to talk to this new older Steve who is slow in ways his friend never had been but he doesn’t know if he could bring himself to answer the calls even if they came. They won’t come, he tells himself. Steve has everything he could ever want or need, he doesn’t need to check in on Bucky. And that selfish part of him raises its head again saying good, good I can finally be something without him.  
But who am I without him?

He gets on a jet alone.

Bucky Barnes—Steve’s Bucky—was KIA in 1943, Sergeant Barnes of the Howling Commandos was murdered by HYDRA in 45 and the last vestiges of the winter soldier were finally destroyed by a teenaged Wakandan scientist in 2016. And here stood James Barnes of so many times and so many names and none of them had been his making and none of them had ever felt quite right.

And part of him wonders if Steve knew. If he wasn’t pretending well enough and if Steve could see that he would never be his Bucky and instead of confronting that or trying and trying to make it work anyways, he went back to someone who would welcome his return. And it wasn’t that Bucky didn’t welcome him, it just always felt like they were trying to recreate the past or like tap dancing around all the hurt. But there was never any moving past that, no moving on for them. And he wonders if part of Steve—beneath the technology and the new clothes and the Avengers—never really left 1940. And maybe realizing that this man in front of him might no longer be the winter soldier but he certainly wasn’t Bucky from Brooklyn was the final straw for Steve. No amount of serum or magic could make him strong enough to accept that reality, so he went back to what he knew. To what he wanted—an end to the war and the arms of a woman. Who was Bucky to begrudge him that?

He walks back across the fields to his home at sunset. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to sleep but he does. He wakes up. Works the land. Gets lost in the rote, the luxury of the ordinary. It doesn’t happen overnight, but he starts to believe the impossible: Bucky is an entire person without Steve Rogers.

Sam Wilson comes to Wakanda on Avengers business and comes to see Bucky. The shield fits him perfectly, the way Steve must have known it would. Sam asks if Bucky has heard from Steve. He hasn’t. And it doesn’t sting with bitterness the way he thought it would. The weight of secrets don’t threaten to spill like tears from his eyes like he thought they would. Like they used to.

Sam offers him a job, if you can call it that. Avenging, defending the earth, fighting evil whatever the tagline might be. Bucky thinks about the vibranium arm in a case under his bed and about the assault rifles and body armor and the blood. Always blood. Then he thinks about his life, his small quiet life, healing, resting after all the firefights.

Bucky tells him no.

Afterwards he wishes that he would feel guilty for that but he can’t make himself. If Steve was gone then he has no reason to walk into a fight ever again. He has a second chance. No draft. No HYDRA. No Thanos. No stupidly brave blonds to follow.  
Just the fog rising off the river in the morning and beautiful Wakandan sunsets. And it is enough.


End file.
